The latest attempt of the Zionist lobby in Canada to shut down attempts to organize peaceful pressure against the state of Israel’s systematic violations of international law came at what must have seemed an opportune moment. On May 17, the day that Bill 202, “the Standing Up Against Anti-Semitism Act, 2016: An Act respecting participation in boycotts and and other anti-Semitic actions”, was presented to the Ontario provincial legislature in Toronto and quickly passed first reading, Ontario Premier Katherine Wynne was in Israel, where she warmly shook the hand of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Wynne was reported as stating during that five-day visit that “any movement like the BDS [Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions] movement that is based on anti-Semitism, that is based on division and promotes hatred, is just unacceptable.”1 Although at the same time Wynne also declared herself a supporter of free speech, the proponents of Bill 202, former Conservative Party leader Tim Hudak, Liberal Party deputy speaker of the House Mike Colle, and Avi Benlolo, the President and CEO of Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, who drafted it with them,2 may have hoped that it could be rushed through the House without significant opposition: the bill was scheduled for second and third readings on May 19 and 20.

The fight between the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee over the Committee’s Torture Report – which Dan Froomkin covered here – has now zeroed in on the White House.

Did the White House order the CIA to withdraw 920 documents from a server made available to Committee staffers, as Senator Dianne Feinstein says the agency claimed in 2010? Were those documents – perhaps thousands of them – pulled in deference to a White House claim of executive privilege, as Senator Mark Udall and then CIA General Counsel Stephen Preston suggested last fall? And is the White House continuing to withhold 9,000 pages of documents without invoking privilege, as McClatchy reported yesterday?

We can be sure about one thing: The Obama White House has covered up the Bush presidency’s role in the torture program for years. Specifically, from 2009 to 2012, the administration went to extraordinary lengths to keep a single short phrase, describing President Bush’s authorization of the torture program, secret.

President Barack Obama violated his own rules for the use of drone strikes in a December 2013 strike on a wedding procession in Yemen, a new report from Human Rights Watch says. The US military initially claimed that the procession was actually members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, then admitted it was a wedding procession, but claimed that most of the people killed in the attack were members of the terrorist organization. But Human Rights Watch says, “The procession also may have included members of AQAP, although it is not clear who they were or what was their fate.” The group went on to say that there is no evidence that members of the caravan posed an imminent threat, and that killing them was a violation of international human rights laws. RT’s Meghan Lopez speaks with investigative journalist Ben Swann about US drone policy and whether the attack was a violation of Obama’s own stated rules.

Ramsey Clark served as U.S. Attorney General in the administration of Lyndon Johnson. He is the convener of the Commission of Inquiry and a human rights lawyer of world-wide respect. This report was given in New York, May 11, 1991.

Incinerated body of an Iraqi soldier on the “Highway of Death,” a name the press has given to the road from Mutlaa, Kuwait, to Basra, Iraq. U.S. planes immobilized the convoy by disabling vehicles at its front and rear, then bombing and straffing the resulting traffic jam for hours. More than 2,000 vehicles and tens of thousands of charred and dismembered bodies littered the sixty miles of highway. The clear rapid incineration of the human being [pictured above] suggests the use of napalm, phosphorus, or other incindiary bombs. These are anti-personnel weapons outlawed under the 1977 Geneva Protocols. This massive attack occurred after Saddam Hussein announced a complete troop withdrawl from Kuwait in compliance with UN Resolution 660. Such a massacre of withdrawing Iraqi soldiers violates the Geneva Convention of 1949, common article 3, which outlaws the killing of soldiers who “are out of combat.” There are, in addition, strong indications that many of those killed were Palestinian and Kuwaiti civilians trying to escape the impending seige of Kuwait City and the return of Kuwaiti armed forces. No attempt was made by U.S. military command to distinguish between military personnel and civilians on the “highway of death.” The whole intent of international law with regard to war is to prevent just this sort of indescriminate and excessive use of force.

“It has never happened in history that a nation that has won a war has been held accountable for atrocities committed in preparing for and waging that war. We intend to make this one different. What took place was the use of technological material to destroy a defenseless country. From 125,000 to 300,000 people were killed… We recognize our role in history is to bring the transgressors to justice.”Ramsey Clark

Bolivian President Evo Morales will file a lawsuit against the US government for crimes against humanity. He has decried the US for its intimidation tactics and fear-mongering after the Venezuelan presidential jet was blocked from entering US airspace.

“I would like to announce that we are preparing a lawsuit against Barack Obama to condemn him for crimes against humanity,” said President Morales at a press conference in the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz. He branded the US president as a “criminal” who violates international law.

In solidarity with Venezuela, Bolivia will begin preparing a lawsuit against the US head of state to be taken to the international court. Furthermore, Morales has called an emergency meeting of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) to discuss what has been condemned by Venezuela as “an act of intimidation by North American imperialism.”

The Bolivian president has suggested that the members of CELAC withdraw their ambassadors from the US to send a message to the Obama Administration. As an additional measure he will call on the member nations of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas to boycott the next meeting of the UN. Members of the Alliance include Antigua and Barbuda, Cuba, Dominica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Saint Lucia.
“The US cannot be allowed to continue with its policy of intimidation and blockading presidential flights,” stressed Morales.

The Pentagon official in charge of Guantanamo Bay has admitted that if he had his time over, he would have argued that the notorious detention camp should never have been built.

William Lietzau, America’s Deputy Assistant Defence Secretary for Detainee Affairs, told The Mail on Sunday in an exclusive interview that Guantanamo’s detainees should have been legally designated as prisoners of war and held in Afghanistan, or if charged with crimes, taken to prisons in America.

Mr Lietzau – who, after three and a half years in his job, last week announced he will be stepping down to take a private sector job in September – added that the best way for President Obama to close Guantanamo would be to announce that the ‘war’ with Al Qaeda is over.

Under international law, this would end any justification for continuing to hold prisoners who had not been charged with crimes.

Lietzau’s words will be seen as explosive, because alone of senior officials who serve the Obama administration in this field now, he played a key role in creating Guantanamo under George W. Bush.

“The Obama administration, like the Bush/Cheney administration before it, clearly considers that the rule of law only applies to the weak and the poor. The administration makes it clear that international law doesn’t apply to the US.”

On July 30, an American judge found Bradley Manning innocent of “aiding the enemy.” Were a typical American asked who the real enemy is, the answer would, invariably be “congress” or the government itself.

Few Americans understand what or who “Al Qaeda” is or is not, especially since they have, of recent, become America’s ally against the government of Syria.

No one is surprised at the Manning verdict, but many around the world are disgusted by it, particularly those who have tired of America’s hypocrisy.

Only two weeks ago, the US government ordered the defacto release of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, in a prisoner swap with Pakistan. She had been considered one of the world’s most dangerous terrorists.

MOSCOW, June 15 (RIA Novosti) – The creation of a no-fly zone in war-torn Syria would contravene international law, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Saturday, amid media speculation that the US plans to do just that.

“You don’t have to be a great expert to realize that this will be a violation of international law. We hope our American colleagues will direct all their practical activity into implementing a joint US-Russian initiative to convene a conference devoted to improving the situation in Syria,” Lavrov said after meeting with his Italian counterpart.

Media reports on Friday cited unidentified Western diplomats as saying that the US, which said this week that it would provide military support to the Syrian opposition, was considering establishing a no-fly zone in Syria. US fighter jets and anti-aircraft missiles were sent to Syria’s neighbor Jordan earlier this month for military exercises.

Exclusive: Methods devised in secret in recent years may breach international law

Manuals tell British interrogators the use of plastic handcuffs is essential to intimidate and disorientate prisoners. Photograph: Getty Images

The British military has been training interrogators in techniques that include threats, sensory deprivation and enforced nakedness in an apparent breach of the Geneva conventions, the Guardian has discovered.

Training materials drawn up secretly in recent years tell interrogators they should aim to provoke humiliation, insecurity, disorientation, exhaustion, anxiety and fear in the prisoners they are questioning, and suggest ways in which this can be achieved.

One PowerPoint training aid created in September 2005 tells trainee military interrogators that prisoners should be stripped before they are questioned. “Get them naked,” it says. “Keep them naked if they do not follow commands.” Another manual prepared around the same time advises the use of blindfolds to put prisoners under pressure.

A manual prepared in April 2008 suggests that “Cpers” – captured personnel – be kept in conditions of physical discomfort and intimidated. Sensory deprivation is lawful, it adds, if there are “valid operational reasons”. It also urges enforced nakedness.

More recent training material says blindfolds, earmuffs and plastic handcuffs are essential equipment for military interrogators, and says that while prisoners should be allowed to sleep or rest for eight hours in each 24, they need be permitted only four hours unbroken sleep. It also suggests that interrogators tell prisoners they will be held incommunicado unless they answer questions.

The 1949 Geneva conventions prohibit any “physical or moral coercion”, in particular any coercion employed to obtain information.

The revelations come after the Guardian published US military documents leaked to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks revealing details of torture, summary executions and war crimes in Iraq.